In celebration of Lord of the Rings Online's fourth anniversary, Senior Staff Writer Chris "Pwyff" Tom sat down with Turbine to chat about their upcoming plans for the game.

In MMO years, four years is quite the distance to travel. For many MMOs, four years marks the twilight of their community population, left with only the most adamant of fans; for others, four years is a milestone they'll never hit, as we've seen with the numerous first-year meltdowns. In reality, coming out of four years of MMO development with ideas still on the plate is quite the accomplishment, but only a few MMOs out there can truly claim that they have a lot more gas left in the tank after such a length of time. Turbine's Lord of the Rings Online is certainly one of those elite few.

In honor of LOTRO's fourth anniversary, I sat down for a quick chat with Turbine's Aaron Campbell and Adam Mersky to talk about their summer plans and why LOTRO will never stop innovating for the years to come.

To get a brief roadmap of LOTRO's progress through to the fall, Aaron and Adam noted that next month will mark the release of Update 3, which will feature a significant amount of fresh content for players to enjoy as they play through the summer to Isengard in the fall. Of course, pack in a planned buried treasure event, the yearly summer festivities, in addition to LOTRO's 4th anniversary celebrations, and you've got yourself a fairly well balanced season for all.

The team at Turbine couldn't be happier with where their game is in its fourth year. Adam pointed out that LOTRO is still in growth mode, and they're really hoping that this could be the trajectory of the game's potential over the next 10 years. There's no doubt that this MMO has been bolstered a huge amount by Turbine's decision to go free-to-play, and it was certainly surprising to hear that even after making that shift, LOTRO actually gained more subscribers than when they were purely subscription based. Of course, it also helps that Turbine rolled out an aggressive new development schedule for LOTRO since they went free-to-play, and that includes Update 3 and, coming this fall, the highly anticipated Isengard expansion.

Content hungry fans will certainly be happy with Update 3's two new skirmishes, Attack at Dawn, a level 30-65 skirmish, and The Icy Crevasse, a level 40-65 skirmish; both of which give some nice armor and jewelry rewards. As well, there are two new 3-person instances on the way, Halls of Night, a level 40-65 instance, and Inn of the Forsaken, a level 20-65 instance. The main point of this new content update was to give players a way to stay busy throughout the summer so, instead of trying to introduce some earth-shattering new innovations, Turbine wisely decided to just beef up their activity list while saving all the real goodies for the end of summer, with Isengard.

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